Yola Floods Every Year. Nobody Is Fixing the Drains.

Ephraim Timothy did not need a meteorologist to tell him it was going to flood. He already knew. He has known every rainy season for the past several years because the drainage channel outside his home in Bachure New Extension, Jimeta, fills with waste until it stops working, and when it stops working, the water has nowhere to go except into the streets and then into houses.

In June 2025, that is exactly what happened. A heavy downpour on a Monday morning overwhelmed the drains that crisscross Bachure, and the water swept into compounds, damaged household property, and forced residents out of their lodgings. The rest of Jimeta coped. Bachure did not.

“This drainage was meant to solve our problems,” Timothy told reporters, “but it’s now the main reason our community is underwater.”

His words carry the exhausted precision of someone who has stopped being surprised. What he is describing is not bad luck. It is a policy failure on a schedule, repeated every year, absorbed entirely by the communities that government infrastructure was built to protect.

On July 27, 2025, intense overnight rainfall combined with suspected water release from the Bole dam overwhelmed Yola’s fragile drainage system, inundating communities in Yola North and Yola South local government areas while most residents were still asleep; by the time Governor Fintiri revised the toll on July 29, 25 people were confirmed dead, thousands had been displaced, and communities including Shagari Phase II, Sabon Pegi, Yolde-Pate, Modire, and Yola Bypass had been entirely submerged.

By the end of 2025, NEMA’s flood dashboard recorded 241 deaths, 839 injuries, and 433,578 people affected across 123 LGAs in 27 states, with 144,790 displaced individuals and 74,767 hectares of farmland damaged; Adamawa State recorded the highest number of affected persons nationwide, with 60,608 people impacted and 23,077 displaced.

At least 15 million Nigerians are at high risk of flooding in 2025, with the federal government warning that flooding is expected to hit 30 of its 36 states, putting more than 1,200 communities at high risk, with Adamawa State explicitly named among the most exposed.

These numbers describe something that should be a national emergency. What they actually describe is a normal year.

When the Drain Becomes the Flood

Urban flooding in Yola and Jimeta is rarely a river story. The Benue River plays a role in the worst seasons, but most of what floods Bachure, Sabon Pegi, and the older quarters of Jimeta begins with drainage infrastructure that was either never built to sufficient capacity, built and then never maintained, or choked with refuse until water has nowhere to go but into someone’s home.

In Bachure New Extension, residents complained of an inadequate drainage system compounded by poor maintenance of the existing one, pointing to largely waste-blocked drains that crisscross the town as the direct cause of flooding that overwhelmed streets and homes while surrounding areas of Jimeta remained dry.

That pattern, one neighbourhood flooding while adjacent areas cope, is the fingerprint of an infrastructure failure rather than a weather event. When a drain functions, heavy rain passes through. When it does not, the water spreads to wherever the lowest ground is, which is usually into the homes of the residents least able to absorb the loss.

In the Ibunu Abbas community on Yola Bypass, flood victims told reporters that NEMA officials arrived with a rescue vehicle and pulled out six dead bodies; four were workers in a bakery, and the other two were children found alongside a drainage system; floodwaters had demolished homes and walls before most residents understood what was happening.

“NEMA came, carried dead bodies, and left,” one resident said. “We are calling on them and the government to come to our aid because we lost everything.”

Behind many of Yola’s and Jimeta’s worst flood spots is a planning history that permitted rapid settlement without adequate infrastructure. Low-lying areas once avoided precisely because they were flood corridors have been built on. Roads were constructed without drainage channels, or with channels too shallow to carry significant rainfall. Where no reliable waste collection system serves a neighbourhood, drains become the default rubbish dump. When gutters fill with plastic sachets and household waste, they cease to function as drainage and become reservoirs of standing water and, in a city where the rainy season brings concentrated runoff, overflow.

The problem is not purely physical. It is behavioural and institutional. Deforestation in and around Adamawa’s urban areas removes the buffering capacity that once slowed rainfall before it reached settlements. Trees absorb water, their roots percolate runoff, and their canopy intercepts rainfall before it hits saturated soil. As tree cover is cleared for agriculture, fuelwood, and construction, rain that would once have been slowed reaches communities faster, in greater volume, and with more erosive force. Nigeria loses an estimated 350,000 to 400,000 hectares of forest annually, according to the FAO, and Adamawa, at the Guinea-Sudan savanna transition, sits on the frontline of that loss.

Climate change is compressing the window. The IPCC projects a 10 to 20 per cent increase in rainfall intensity across parts of Nigeria by 2050, meaning rains arrive later in the season but fall harder in shorter bursts, overwhelming soils baked by longer dry seasons. A drain at half its design capacity, blocked by refuse, functions at perhaps a quarter of what a growing city needs. The deficit is filled by flooded streets and collapsed walls.

The Gap Between Warning and Action

It would be inaccurate to say the government does nothing. After the July 27 flood, Governor Fintiri directed the Deputy Governor to immediately mobilise emergency agencies, the military, and marine police to affected areas; the state government deployed engine boats and rescue equipment, coordinated with the North East Development Commission on relief, and dispatched a technical team from the Upper Benue River Basin Development Authority to assess the Kofsopah Dam in Fufore LGA, investigating whether upstream dam construction contributed to the downstream flooding.

In August 2025, NEMA issued a formal flood alert for Jimeta, reporting that the water level at Bakin Kogi had surpassed the warning threshold of 6.0 metres and that discharge rates from upstream sources exceeded 3,222 cubic metres per second, activating coordination with Disaster Response Units and placing low-lying areas of Jimeta under immediate threat.

Emergency response exists. Seasonal warnings are issued. Agencies mobilise after disasters. The persistent gap is in the unglamorous work that prevents disasters rather than responding to them. Drain maintenance requires nothing more than organised labour and a consistent budget line. It produces no ribbon-cutting photographs. It is invisible when it succeeds, because success means no floods. It only becomes visible when it fails, and by that point the water is already in someone’s house.

The political incentive to invest in prevention is structurally weaker than the incentive to respond to disaster once it has happened. A government that responds visibly to floods after they occur is seen as active. A government that quietly clears drains every dry season and never makes headlines is invisible. That asymmetry is not incidental to why Yola floods every year. It is the reason.

Early warning systems face a different problem at the community level. Warnings issued through television, radio, and social media often do not reach the residents of Bachure or Sabon Pegi through accessible channels, and when they do, they frequently go unacted upon. A family that has invested everything in a home in a flood-prone area and has nowhere else to go cannot realistically act on a warning that offers no alternative. A warning without support is an incomplete intervention. It shifts moral responsibility without shifting the Whatter.

Civil society organisations working on community-level flood preparedness fill a genuine gap here. Teaching residents to maintain the drains outside their homes, recognise flood risk before building on a site, and act on early warnings are not substitutes for government infrastructure, but they are the difference between a community that copes and one that is simply overwhelmed. Both tracks are needed. Neither alone is enough.

In Sabon Pegi, Jared Enoch was woken on the morning of July 27 by a loud thud. When he came outside, he found that his wall had collapsed. Water was entering the house with, in his words, “so much intensity”. He gathered his children and ran. By the time they were outside, the living room had collapsed with all their belongings inside. He lost his animals, his equipment, and the walls of a home he had built over years.

“I’m not just looking for where my family can rest our heads right now,” he said.

The most dangerous thing about recurring floods in Yola and Jimeta is not the water. It is the normalisation. When communities flood every year, the disaster stops feeling like a governance failure and starts feeling like weather, something to endure rather than something institutions are held accountable for preventing. That shift from outrage to resignation is where the deepest damage is done, because it removes the political pressure that change requires.

The water will come again this rainy season. The same drains will be blocked. The same low-lying settlements will absorb what infrastructure refuses to carry. The same families will move their mattresses to higher ground and hope the water does not reach the door frame.

The only question worth asking is whether, by then, someone has cleared the drains.